COMBATING OBESITY AMONG ADOLESCENTS

A healthier India demands more than awareness — it requires healthy eating plates, playgrounds, policy action, youth leadership, and a major shift in our food environments

- 

There is an increased focus in public discourse on growing obesity among adolescents. The seventh edition of Poshan Pakhwada, held last month, focused on childhood and adolescent obesity alongside the first 1,000 days of life. The 'Let's Fix Our Food' consortium, a multi-stakeholder initiative spearheaded by the Indian Council of Medical Research-National Institute of Nutrition, the Public Health Foundation of India,

UNICEF-India, and others, recently released a set of policy briefs advocating for the need to better the food environments for adolescents. Last month, in a move to improve transparency on food labels, the Supreme Court gave the Central government a strict three-month window to finalise and enforce transparent food labelling regulations. More recently, the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development and NCERT issued guidelines and directives to all schools to monitor sugar and salt in foods that are made available to children and adolescents. These measures point towards growing concern about the problem.

Nutrition paradox